Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi's opening night -- and Chomsky

            That the "Banquet Years" were to a large extent the outgrowth of the French Anarchists isn't something one is permitted to lose sight of.  Probably, many in those days viewed the changes in art and music as progress.  But from our perspective, the years between 1885 and 1918 were at best a cul de sac to which one can go and appreciate a piece or two by Eric Satie, a few primitive paintings by Henri Rousseau . . . and something Alfred Jarry.  Jarry is the third of four artists Roger Shattuck decided to concentrate upon.

            Jarry was wild enough to satisfy the anarchistic tastes of that period.  Consider his Ubu Roi, the play Shattuck seems to be putting forward as Jarry's magnum opus.  Here is his description of opening night:

            "December 11, 1896, the opening night, is worth describing in detail.  There had been nothing like it since the wild premiere of Victor Hugo's Hernani in 1830 . . . ."

            "Before the curtain went up, a crude table was brought out covered with a piece of old sacking.  Jarry appeared looking dead white, for he had made himself up like a streetwalker to face the footlights.  Nervously sipping from a glass, he spoke in his flattest, most clipped tones, for ten minutes . . . In these earnest nonsense lines Jarry was already insinuating that the play is more than it appears, that the true setting of farce is (like Poland, a country long condemned to the nonexistence of partition) an Eternity of Nowhere, and that contradiction is the mode of its logic.  The speech did not exactly insure a sympathetic reception. . . ."

            "' . . . the scenery was painted to represent, by a child's conventions, indoors and out of doors, and even the torrid, temperate, and arctic zones at once.  Opposite you, at the back of the stage, you saw apple trees in bloom, under a blue sky, and against the sky a small closed window and a fireplace . . . through the very midst of which . . . trooped in and out the clamorous and sanguinary persons of the drama.  On the left was painted a bed, and at the foot of the bed a bare tree and snow falling.  On the right there were palm trees . . . a door opened against the sky, and beside the door a skeleton dangled.  A venerable gentleman in evening dress . . . trotted across the stage on the points of his toes between every scene and hung the new placard on its nail.  (Studies in Seven Arts.)'

            "Gemier, swollen and commanding in his pear shaped costume (but without a mask, despite Jarry's campaign), stepped forward to speak the opening line -- a single word.  He had not known how to interpret the role until Lugne-Poe had suggested he imitate the author's own voice and jerky stylized gestures.  The midget Jarry truly sired the monster Ubu.  In a voice like a hammer, Gemier pronounce an obscenity which Jarry had appropriated to himself by adding one letter.

            "'Merdre,' Gemier said.  'Shite.'

            "It was fifteen minutes before the house could be silenced.  The mot de Cambronne had done its work; the house was pandemonium.  Those who had been lulled by Jarry's opening speech were shocked awake; several people walked out without hearing any more.  The rest separated into two camps of desperately clapping enthusiasts and whistling scoffers.  Fist fights started in the orchestra.  The critics were on the spot, their reactions observed by both sides. . . A few demonstrators simultaneously clapped and whistled in divided sentiments.  Malarme sat quiet, waiting to see more of the 'prodigious personage' to whose author he addressed a letter the following dy.  Jarry's supporters shouted, 'You wouldn't understand Shakespeare either.'  Their opponents replied with variations on the mot of the evening. . . ."

            "Finally, Gemier improvised a jig and sprawled out on the prompter's box.  His diversion restored enough order to allow the action to proceed to the next 'Merdre,' when the audience took over once more.  The interruptions continued for the rest of the evening. . .  Pere Ubu and Mere Ubu use language more scatological than erotic . . .   The curtain rang down that night and the next on the only two performances of Ubu Roi until it was revived by Gemier in 1908.  For the Theatre de l'Oeuvre it was the catastrophe that made it famous.

            "Also present in the house was a young Irishman by the name of William Butler Yeats.  Despite a very limited knowledge of the language, his description of the performance is worth repeating.  'I go to the 1st performance of Jarry's Ubu Roy, at the Theatre de l'Oeuvre, with Rhymer . . .  The audience shake their fists at one another, and Rhymer whispers to me, 'There are often duels after these performances,' and explains to me what is happening on the stage.  The players are supposed to be dolls, toys, marionettes, and now they are all hopping like wooden frogs, and I can see for myself that the chief personage, who is some kind of king carries for a sceptre a brush of the kind that we use to clean a closet.  Feeling bound to support the most spirited party, we have shouted for the play, but that night at the Hotel Corneille I am very sad, for comedy, objectivity, has displayed its growing power once more.  I say, After S. Mallarme, after Verlaine, after G. Moreau, after Puvis de Chavannes, after our own verse, after the faint mixed things of Conder, what more is possible?  After us the Savage God.  (Autobiography.)'

            "No event marks more clearly than this the close of one era and the imminence of another.  Yeats did not have to understand French to perceive the significance of Ubu, natural offspring of the turbulence of the nineties."

           

            COMMENT:   Most of us like a good joke, and perhaps this human characteristic stretches back to our beginning as a species.  But we have become so highly industrialized, sophisticated, and independent, perhaps we don't always realize that what we are watching or listening to ought to be viewed as a joke and not progress.  Some painters tried to imitate the "primitivism" of Henri Rousseau.   Shattuck doesn't imply that many tried to imitate Erik Satie; although, he tells us, he had an influence on many of the composers of his day.   And what of Alfred Jarry's influence?  I am only 211/360 through Shattuck's book and he hasn't said yet, but who can read of Pere Ubu without thinking of James Joyce?

            I wanted to pause here to consider the relation of what Shattuck says about Jarry's direction and Noam Chomsky.  Shattuck says of Jarry, "He left behind every standard, ethic, maxim, golden rule, and secret of success.  In the end his role implies new, almost nonhuman standards, and its most immediate significant aspect is the completeness of the transformation he wrought.   Everything in his universe had to yield to his power to change it.  Nothing escaped . . . ."   Some of what Shattuck says about Jarry must surely apply to Chomsky as well.  He has been fairly successful in his role as an anti-American anarchist; so he has been more successful than Jarry was, but Chomsky too has "left behind every standard, ethic, maxim . . . and Golden Rule."  And if one tries to take something Chomsky has said in attacking America and make it into a Kantian or Benthamite principle, Chomsky's attack can be seen for what it really is, illogical rant.

            Does this mean that Chomsky might be in sympathy with Jarry's desire to create his own universe and subject everything to his power?   Jarry didn't make the kind of money Chomsky does.  He couldn't afford good alcohol; so he resorted to ether which was a very inexpensive way to become intoxicated back then.  He died of influenza, but perhaps he wouldn't have if he hadn't been so weakened by poor eating habits and the ether.  And if he had gone on, as Chomsky has, would he not have been just as illogical, just as insistent on his own special view of the Universe?  He wouldn't have been anti-British back then, but I suspect he might have transformed himself into a pacifist if he had survived World War I.  Jarry attacked the Universe -- at least the part he was interested in -- as he found it.   The war became an easy target for the Anarchists, the intellectual Anarchists who filtered themselves through the Banquet Years, to oppose -- not so much that war that had just ended as any future wars.  We can see that sort of pacifism as illogical, but we have already seen that Anarchy is illogical almost by definition.  The pacifists who arose after World War I were not terribly worried by those who argued that their opposition to Britain's preparing for a new war against Germany, rendered their nation a serious disservice.  Anarchists, and anti-whatever-powers-that-happen-to-be, don't really care whether their nations are destroyed.  Like ee cummings who lived through this period, they can sanguinely let this Western World destroy itself because "Listen: there is a hell of a good universe next door.  Let's go."

Aijalon Mahli Gomes -- got to admire him

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5go-hSba81wIKMbJVbeA5_30DujMAD9EUIJ7G0

            Aijalon Mahli Gomes, a teacher from Boston who had been teaching English to South Koreans, decided to walk across the border into North Korea, knowing he would be arrested, with the intention of protesting North Korea's human rights abuses. 

            Assuming the absence of psychological problems, and the articles I read don't refer to any, I do admire someone so strongly convinced of his principles that he is willing to put his life on the line.  He is like the Christian martyrs of old -- albeit a modern Boston variety of one. 

            Will his sacrifice achieve the results he desires?  Maybe -- a little: ". . . North Korea expert Yoo Ho-yeol of Korea University in Seoul said Gomes will likely be released without having to serve the prison term. He predicted North Korea would use him as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the U.S. on its nuclear program.

            "'Continuing to hold him in custody is also a burden for North Korea,' as it will only galvanize criticism of its human rights record, Yoo said.

            "He said North Korea will likely press for payment of the fine, or at least a negotiated amount."
            COMMENT:   Much of what I've been reading recently has been critical of the idea that there are any fixed principles.  Heidegger more or less assumed that when he urged Germans to seek authentication in their heritage.   His idea, it seems to me, was that even though there are no fixed principles, one can be true to what is best in one's heritage or tradition.  He wasn't specific, but I thought the idea had merit.  Even people who don't believe in anything can seek the good from their tradition.  Sartre, following Heidegger a little, thought that one ought to look about, seek the best ideology at hand and follow that.  For Sartre that was Communism. 
            What was Aijalon Mahli Gome's "tradition."  To some extent it had to be Christianity, but he didn't travel into North Korea to convert the Communist pagans, he went there to protest their human rights abuses:  ". . . Gomes — described by friends as a devout Christian — attended rallies in Seoul in support of Park, a fellow Christian from the U.S. who deliberately went into the North in December to call attention to the nation's rights record.

            "A Seoul-based activist familiar with Gomes, Jo Sung-rae, said he might have been inspired by Park to make a similar trip.

            ""Gomes was weeping and he looked so sincere when he asked me if I knew anything about Robert Park's status in North Korea,' Jo said Wednesday."
            We are too used to hearing about the willingness of Islamists to sacrifice their lives for what they believe.  We hear to much about their desire to strap on bombs and blow up unbelievers.  It is refreshing to read about Gomes with a similar level of commitment, sacrificing himself in accordance with his Western, Christian, and (with hat doffed to Boston) Liberal traditions.

"Revenge" -- Chenya, Chomsky, and Mary Beard

http://www.sevensidedcube.net/world/2010/moscow-subway-blasts-chechen-militant-responsible/

            The above article quotes the Doku Umarov, the Chechen leader who leads Islamic militants in Chechnya and other regions of Russia's North Caucasus as saying "this is revenge for killing of civilians by Russian Security."  I don't think the Chechen's know any more about "revenge" than Noam Chomsky knows about America's "guilt."  Here is what Wikipedia has to say about Revenge: "Revenge (also known as vengeance) is a harmful action against a person or group as a response to a real or perceived grievance. Although many aspects of revenge resemble the concept of justice, revenge connotes a more injurious and punitive focus as opposed to a harmonious and restorative one. Whereas justice generally implies actions undertaken and supported by a legitimate judicial system, by a system of ethics, or on behalf of an ethical majority, revenge generally implies actions undertaken by an individual or narrowly defined group outside the boundaries of judicial or ethical conduct. The goal of revenge usually consists of forcing the perceived wrongdoer to suffer the same or greater pain than that which was originally inflicted."

             How does the killing of 39 people in a Moscow subway force wrongdoers "to suffer the same or greater pain" than the Chechen's suffered?  In order for this to be a logical act, they need to show that the 39 people were "wrongdoers."  If they can't do that, and I don't think they can, then they need to produce an argument to explain their reasoning -- that is, if they wish to be "perceived" by the rest of us as reasonable.  Even mad people have their reasons for doing what they do.  Some mad people are even coherent enough to explain them to their doctors.  But what are the Chechen's reasons?  They can describe how they suffered injury.  That is fairly easy to understand, but how do they connect the 39 people on the subway to their injury.

            Mary Beard engaged in Doku Umarov's rationalization (I'll use that word for want of a better) when she claimed that 9/11 was "chicken's coming home to roost."  It obviously didn't surprise her that Islamic radicals blew up the World Trade Center.  She could see it as an act of "revenge," but is it?  The Islamists who blew up the WTC were vague about their grievances and make no attempt to connect the people who worked in the WTC with those grievances.  They would have been happy to kill all of them, but why?  What is the reasoning behind their act?  How were the people who worked in the WTC perceived as "wrongdoers" by the young "martyrs" who flew passenger-planes into the Twin Towers? 

            Chomsky, who in some circles is perceived as a great thinker, engages in similar thinking when he blames modern day "America" for such things as slavery, giving Indians blankets contaminated with disease, killing off the buffalo and "Wounded Knee."  When he expresses his "anti-Americanism" he dwells at some length upon these early American wrongdoings.  He clearly wants these wrongdoings to count against present-day America.  If you like present-day America and support it, then you are a wrongdoer guilty of slavery and giving diseased blankets to Indians.   Chomsky doesn't bother with logic any more than Duku Umarov or Mary Beard.  How does the guilt of 18th century slave owners reflect upon a modern American whose ancestors never owned slaves or gave diseased blankets to Indians?

            But let's for the sake of argument assume some individual did have ancestors who were slave owners and other ancestors who gave diseased blankets to Indians, and knew it.  How does this individual share in the guilt of his ancestors?  It would be interesting if Chomsky could give up his polemics long enough to deal with a question like this.  I would ask this individual, "do you agree with what your ancestors did?"  If he said he did, then he is guilty of having defective morals.  But do his morals reflect upon America at large.  More than likely he will say he does not agree.  Most Americans would not.  Most Americas see that we "don't do those things anymore."  Most Americans we see that we have moved away from the immorality of those acts.  So moving the matter back to Chomsky how do either of these positions of this hypothetical individual reflect on modern-day America?

            Chomsky has no coherent argument.  Neither does Mary Beard.  Neither does Doku Umarov.  What these three have in common is blind unreasoning hatred and prejudice.  This is the sort of prejudice the slave owners felt toward black people in the South.  It is the sort of prejudice that the early American farmers felt toward the Indian.   It is the sort of prejudice that the Nazis felt against the Jews.  And it is the sort of prejudice Chomsky and Beard feel against America and Umarov feels against Russia.  Chomsky, practices and gives evidence in every speech of the sort of prejudice that he holds America accountable for, but he is guilty of that same sort of prejudice.  America has largely moved past theirs, but Chomsky still wallows in his.  Look first to the beam in thine own eye, Chomsky, before thou worry about the speck in thy brother's (to paraphrase something some place in the Bible).

Anarchy, rebellion, and Chomsky

            On pages 23-24 of The Banquet Years, The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I, Roger Shattuck writes, "The atmosphere of permanent explosion in artistic activity is evidence not only of anarchistic tendencies but also of the fierceness of its experiments.  New reviews appeared, principally La Vogue . . .  the long-lived Mercure de France, and the Natanson brothers' Revue Blanche. . . The Salon des Independents outgrew one building after another with more and more work from young painters, while ethnological museums were being filled with astounding art from Africa, the Pacific, and Egypt.  The new Schola Cantorum brought back old church modes, and composers began to collect the ancient songs of France.  Modernism coincided in significant fashion with primitivism.  Gauguin's 'flight' to Tahiti in 1891 may not have produced his best work but it reveals the integrity of his desire for another vision.  Anarchism itself can be seen as a form of political primitivism trying to return to an earlier stage of social evolution.  What one can overlook most easily in all this demonstration is its stubborn purpose to change the aspect of both life and art.  There was a connection and a difference between the irrepressible frivolity of the upper classes and the resolute gaiety of young artists.

            "Deep down at its center of gravity, however, the center turned slowly despite all this ferment.  It changed its pace for no man.  Artists who strained forward into the future found that their fresh trail was rarely being followed in a prosperous and complacent France.  In response they did what was only natural: they banded together for support.  They constituted what we have come to call the avant-garde, a 'tradition' of heterodoxy and opposition which defied civilized values in the name of individual consciousness.  They developed a systematic technique of scandal in order to keep their ideas before the public.  It amounted to an artistic underground, which began to break through to the surface in the latter part of the Banquet Years."

            COMMENT:  The "scorn and hate of every hierarchy of society" carried over from politics to art.  Artists, much like the political agitators, were not so much interested in a better system as in expressing their "scorn and hate of every hierarchy of society."  The political agitators ended up under the guillotine or in prison, but the artists, were inclined more toward the pen than the sword.  They concentrated upon scorn rather than hatred.  They wanted not only to produce something new but to shock the "powers that be" out of their complacency.  Why?  Why does the young son of today come home with a spiked hair cut and an ear-ring?  Why does the young girl come home with a tattoo?  They get noticed.  They get attention. 

            If Shattuck is right in seeing anarchy as not merely a reaction to the status quo, but as a seeking after the primitive, we can ask whether this is a good thing.  I don't know whether Anarchists ask themselves this question.  If one is caught up in the anticipated shock when mom sees that tattoo, the daughter may not have asked herself whether it is a good thing.  They step beyond "art for art's sake" and seek "art for shock's sake."  Not merely that, of course, the best of them wanted to be good, to be genuinely creative, but they enjoyed being shocking as well, and perhaps shock was all the lesser talents had going for them.

            I paused in writing this to eat dinner, and while eating watched the first part of a Netflix movie, Against the Dark.  Steven Seagal tells his fellow vampire hunters, "we're not in this to determine who's right and who's wrong, we're in this to determine who lives and who dies."  While the French Anarchists probably didn't pose the same threat that the vampires did in the movie, the threat did exist.  The French Anarchists did kill people and the French state didn't bother overly much with the idea of whether the Anarchists might be right, they determined that they should die.  They were a patent threat to French people, especially French leaders; so they were sent to the guillotine. 

            The threat of modern day Anarchists, the anti-Americans such as Noam Chomsky is not as severe.   He is a political agitator to be sure, but he isn't given to violence.  He isn't in it for the shock value like the Anarchist artists, the Avant-Garde, he truly hates America and sides with its enemies whenever possible.   One of the distinguishing marks of the American Anarchist is to hold American guilty in the present for sins committed in the past, and Chomsky has all those old sins memorized.   Chomsky hasn't the ability to step back and wonder whether all nations do or have done similar things to what America has, and he hasn't the ability to see improvement in America. 

            Furthermore he isn't willing to exercise that part of his social contract which allows him to immigrate to another nation should he so choose.  Why doesn't he leave?  Surely it isn't good for him psychologically or physically to stay in a nation he hates so much.  I can answer that question for him.  All nations are pretty much the same, that is, they have human beings in positions of authority, humans with a representative number of flaws -- flaws like everyone else has.  They make decisions which may be wrong.  Chomsky thinks it was wrong of American to remove the Saddam regime, for example.  His opinion wasn't universal.  The pros and cons were argued before the American people.  There were good arguments for removing Saddam.  Chomsky later wrote a book called Hegemony or Survival, America's Quest for Global Dominance, in which he refers to America's invasion of Iraq as a monumental crime.  George Bush was just like Joseph Stalin.  He wrote his book in 2003 when his arguments seemed plausible to some.  He was convinced Iraq would go from bad to worse.  Like so much of what Chomsky wrote, he was wrong.  Iraq is turning out to be what George Bush hoped it would be, a fledgling democracy, perhaps a democratic example to other nations in the Middle East.  Saddam Hussein had been a threat in the region.  I won't revisit the details, but other nations were afraid of him.   Now he is gone and Iraq is well on its way toward being a democracy.  Is Chomsky interested in that?  I suspect not.  I doubt that he will write a sequel entitled, "America's sacrifices for the good of Iraq and the Middle East."

            My point here isn't that the Anarchists should agree with me, but that they should understand that there were potent arguments of America doing what it did.  America isn't "guilty" simply because Chomsky assumes that it is.  He makes his assertions about America's guilt time after time, but he presents no argument.  He tells us invading Iraq is wrong, therefore America is guilty.   Is he capable of wrestling with the pros and cons of invasion as Kenneth Pollack did in The Threatening Storm, the case for invading Iraq?  That doesn't seem to be one of Chomsky's skills.

RE: Chomsky in the light of French Anarchism.

            Billy Blogblather (see his comments below) introduces some interesting considerations.  He writes, "No one has authority over anyone but that one agrees by the will of another or of some groups."  I'm not absolutely sure what that means, but it sounds like the individual is free to abrogate the social contract he has with his nation if he disagrees with it.   Billy says that he has no intention of abrogating his, but that may be a personal decision.  His "principle" if he has created one, seems to leave that open to the individual.  Correct me Billy, if I'm wrong.

            Without studying the matter exhaustively, what I have studied suggests that every nation has done something that some citizens object to.  According to the Billy Blogblather principle (assuming I understand it).  Those citizens, much as the French citizens who resorted to Anarchy, have the right to abrogate their social contract and take some sort of action against their nation.  The French Anarchists of the 1890s liked to throw bombs at their leaders.  Noam Chomsky likes to go about the world giving speeches.

            Interestingly, Chomsky, and Billy, aren't concerned about America changing its ways and doing better in the future.  They both hold America to account for past sins.  Most Protestants believe there is no unforgiveable sin, but that isn't the case with Chomsky and Blogblather.  They reserve the right to severe their social contract (should they choose to, which they don't) based upon past sins -- sins America no longer commits.  Of course there are new sins they object to, but are they not being inconsistent by bring up past sins?  Every nation has bushel baskets full of those.  We who admire Liberal Democracy admire its ability to correct its mistakes.  Look, we used to believe in Slavery, but we don't any more.  Shouldn't we get some credit for abrogating slavery?  Not by a long shot, say Chomsky and Blogblather.  Don't forget Wounded Knee either.  So what would it take, Chomsky Blogblather, for you to become reconciled to Liberal Democracy such that you quit bringing up those past sins.

            As to acquiring a "compassionate moral code," we are quite a bit more compassionate than we used to be.  Also, for example, what is "compassionate" by one person's standards may be "criminal coddling" by another's.  We get to vote on all those matters and if our representatives represent us and the Supreme Court doesn't overrule us, our opinions become law.  Surely you aren't saying that if we get out voted, our social contract with our nation is null and void.

Lawrence

Billy Blogblather has left a new comment on your post "Chomsky in the light of French Anarchism":

And #2 daughter was right. No one has authority over anyone but that one agrees to abide by the will of another or of some group. And that agreement can be rescinded at any time. Most of us no longer believe in the divine right of kings or any other ruler -- even of God many would say. This seems to me to be the bedrock value of liberal democracy. I can yell "fire" in a crowded theater, I can blow up buildings because I'm angry, I (as a nation) can invade countries because I desperately need their resources. I can make $300 million dollars a year while millions go under nourished. It's liberal democracy. I wouldn't have anything else. Except liberal democracy with a compassionate moral code. I think this is all that Noam Chomsky ever argued. The military evil we unleashed in Latin America and Vietnam, the economic evil we unleashed in the US through slavery and Jim Crow, these are but the most egregious offense against our credo of equality, justice and (the French, god love 'em) fraternity. For the sake of money this nation has committed many crimes. We've not starved millions as Stalin did in the Ukraine, nor as Mao executed after the Revolution or during the Cultural Revolution, we have no Babi Yar to account for -- well, there's Wounded Knee and The Trail of Tears and many other massacres, but they were just Indians and that was long ago. Bunches of blacks got hanged, but that's all history now. Over all, we're quite a Christian nation. Love your neighbor and all that. Chomsky bickers. He seems to think that we have had other motives in mind besides Justice, Equality, (and yes, the French again) Fraternity. All Chomsky is asking is that we stop being idiots at look at what's going on. But when you're comfortable, why should you do that?

Chomsky in the light of French Anarchism

            Knowing that Noam Chomsky was an Anarchist didn't inspire me to go off and study Anarchy, but I ran across an interesting mention in Roger Shattuck's The Banquet Years, The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I, (written in 1958) Shattuck begins his book by describing how everything is going well.  Oh yes, there was the death of Victor Hugo, the affair of General Boulanger, the Dreyfus affair, the constant dueling and fist-fights, but there were the salons and cafes and Sarah Bernhardt and everyone in France seemed to be having a giddy good time, with one exception. 

            "The most turbulent force of all is almost forgotten.  Anarchism had been seething for many years in the south, principally in the industrial city of Lyon.  Its way was prepared by the surge of antimilitarism after the war of 1871 and by the fresh memory of the Commune.  Traveling inexorably northward, the libertarian movement finally shook Paris in a series of bomb explosions and controversial trials.

            "'Anarchists come from the most varied backgrounds.  But a specific mentality links them -- the spirit of revolt and its derivatives, the spirit of examination and criticism, of opposition and innovation, which leads to scorn and hate of every commitment and hierarchy in society, and ends up in the exaggeration of individualism.  Decadent literature furnished the party with a strong contingent; in recent years there has been, especially among young writers, an upsurge of anarchism.  (Maurice Boisson, Les attentats anarchistes.)'

            Boisson wrote in 1931, but his description seems to fit Chomsky rather well.  There was much in France at the time we might look back and criticize or make fun of, but French people seemed to enjoy being French.   Freud  told us that one of the things a nation does when it thinks extremely well of itself is build a gigantic phallic symbol.  It was in 1899 that they built their Eiffel Tower, the tallest man made structure in the world for half a century.  But Anarchists as Boisson's description tells us are never happy in happy times.  Shattuck continues, "First Ravachol, with five murders behind him, blew up the homes of several magistrates in 1892.  He was caught in a restaurant, brought to trial, and let off with penal servitude for life.  Then another jury, intimidated by public outcry, reversed the decision and sent him to the guillotine.  The end of the same year Vaillant, of illegitimate birth and hysterical disposition, tossed a weak bomb full of nails into the Chamber of Deputies from the visitor's gallery.  None of the deputies was killed, and Vaillant, pleading in his defense that the bomb was intended only as a 'warning,' quoted Darwin, Spencer, Ibsen, and Octave Mirbeau in support of his doctrine.  After his execution he was widely acclaimed as a martyr.  At a literary banquet the evening of Vaillant's bombing, the polemical critic Laurent Tailhade was interviewed about the violence in the Chamber.  'What do a few human lives matter,' he replied' 'si le geste est beau?' Two years later he lost an eye when a bomb exploded in the restaurant where he was eating, and the next morning's paper chastised him with his own Nietzschean sentiments.  Yet his sympathies were shared by many."

            "A few weeks after Vaillant's death, a young intellectual of good family named Emile Henry exploded a bomb in the Cafe Terminus in the Gare Saitn-Lazare.  He had to be saved by the police from being lynched on the spot.  The trial brought out the full challenge of anarchist convictions.  Judge (in red robe): 'your hands are stained with blood.'  Henry: 'Like the robes you wear, Your Honor.'  His coolness on the stand allowed him to discuss the precise chemical composition of his bomb and regret that it had not taken the lives of more victims.  He died bravely under the knife crying, 'Vive l'anarchie,' and it was discovered that he had spent his last days in prison reading Don Quixote."

            Shattuck provides some other examples, which I will skip, then he writes, "By 1894 most sympathizers realized that the defiance of the anarchists exceeded defensible bounds, and the outrages died out quickly.  But their effects remained.  Anarchism served not only to unsettle the political smugness of the Third Republic, but also to challenge any formulated aesthetic. . ."

            The challenges to the formulated aesthetics of the time are also interestingly described, but, as far as I know, Chomsky has not engaged in anything equivalent.  Still, one can't but help but be aware of the faddish changes in clothes and music as each new generation resents and rebels against the previous.  Is it of the same spirit as anarchy?  A better question might be to ask whether " the spirit of revolt and its derivatives, the spirit of examination and criticism, of opposition and innovation, which leads to scorn and hate of every commitment and hierarchy in society" isn't derived from something like sibling jealousy.  My number two daughter often said to the number one daughter, six years her senior, with great heat, "you're not the boss of me." 

            Do the Anarchists have some system that they think is better than Liberal Democracy.  Chomsky says that he does.  But I doubt that anyone takes his system seriously.  What he does better than anyone else is to tell all and sundry, "you're not the boss of me."  He heaps scorn and hate upon every commitment of the American Liberal Democracy.  Every exertion of economic or military success is opposed by Chomsky who in effect says, "you are not only not the boss of me, you ought not to be the boss of anyone else."  Chomsky phrases his scorn and hate much better than my number two daughter did, but my daughter was only a child at the time.

R. G. Collingwood, is he still worth reading?

            In the current issue of the London Review of Books is a review of History Man: The Life of R.G. Collingwood by Fred Inglis.  The review was written by Mary Beard and entitled "No More Scissors and Paste."  It is not available on line.

I'll quote a bit from it and comment below: 

            "For all the engaging enthusiasm of the book, two important questions about Collingwood’s achievements and his academic profile remain only half convincingly answered. First, how important is The Idea of History, the posthumous book which remains his most famous work? Second, what was the connection, if any, between the two academic sides of his career, the Romano-British archaeology and the philosophy? What, in other words, does the Roman Inscriptions of Britain have to do with The Idea of History, let alone the Essay on Metaphysics?

            "The Idea of History has had some very distinguished supporters. By his own account, it was the book that inspired Quentin Skinner at the start of his own historical career – and Skinner of course went on to give his own distinctive spin to Collingwood’s slogan about all history being a ‘history of the mind’. And, if only in the absence of much competition (it is a classic, as Collini has observed, ‘in a field not over-supplied with classics written in English’), it used to be the theoretical standby of undergraduates reading history at university, or of sixth-formers wanting to do so. It still appears on general bibliographies and is warmly recommended to their pupils by ambitious schoolteachers (though when, a few years ago, I asked a group of about 50 third-year students studying history in Cambridge whether any of them had read it, not a single one put up their hand). . . ."

             "Rereading The Idea of History after some 30 years or so, I found myself less impressed than I had been as a student, or at least more counter-suggestible. His image of the mindless, unquestioning narration of ‘scissors and paste’ history, and of generations of historians being content merely to stick one source after another, now seems very largely a self-serving myth. It did not require the birth of narratology or the return to fashion of ‘grand narrative’, to realise that historical narration is always selective and always posing questions about the evidence. No history – not even the most austere chronicle – has ever been as unquestioning as Collingwood paints his imaginary methodological enemy. . . ."
            COMMENT:  Beard implies that Collingwood's work on History and hermeneutics was hardly worth doing, that he wasted time stating the obvious or attacking straw men.  I have a very different opinion from having read Collingwood.   If he spent time stating the obvious, why is it that previous works of history, say prior to 1895 have the very flaws that Collingwood described -- a mere stating of facts without drawing us into the events of the time?   I once spent quite a lot of time reading works of history about the Middle Ages.  I don't recall if Norman F. Cantor was a fan of Collingwood, but in his Inventing the Middle Ages, he demonstrates that works of history written prior to about 1895 are no longer worth reading.  Historians prior to that time didn't know who to write them.   So if Collingwood was stating the obvious, it wasn't obvious to historians who wrote prior to 1895.
            Mary Beard is certainly qualified to write about history -- at least about certain segments of it.  She is "a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge and classics editor of the TLS. Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town won the Wolfson History Prize for 2008."  On the other hand we know something else about this particular historian: (The following is from Wikipedia)  "Shortly after the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, Beard was one of several authors invited to contribute articles on the topic to the London Review of Books. She opined that many people, once "the shock had faded", thought 'the United States had it coming', and that '[w]orld bullies, even if their heart is in the right place, will in the end pay the price' (the so-called 'Roosting Chickens argument'). In a November 2007 interview, she stated that the hostility these comments provoked had still not subsided, although she believed it had become a standard viewpoint that terrorism was associated with American foreign policy. '
            That Beard was wrong about 9/11, and I sincerely believe that she was, doesn't necessarily mean that she is wrong about Collingwood, but I believe she was wrong about him as well -- at least insofar as works of history written about the Middle Ages.  Perhaps historians who wrote prior to 1895 about Pompeii were more perceptive.  I wonder how much Mary Beard has read by or about Collingwood besides The Idea of History and this biography by Inglis; which she finds too adulatory.
            As to the subject question,  Mary Beard believes that Collingwood is dated.  I on the other hand share the opinion of Inglis, Skinner, Collini and others that he is still worth reading.